A dear friend of mine (J) recently made a mormon.org profile. I love that girl and love that she opened up about her adoption experience (she's a birth mother to JJ) and made a profile. In her profile she stated that she was a first time mom. Someone read that and well they thought it would be a good idea to flat out attack my friend.
M stated HERE in her wonderful attack on J:
You say you are a first-time mom to your SECOND born child because you gave the first one away. http://mormon.org/xxxxxxxx. Now, I am not a swearing woman, but WHAT IN THE HELL are you smoking? Are you so intoxicated on the adoption Kool-aid that it runs icy cold through your veins instead of real blood? Is your heart so beyond feeling that you cannot for ONE MOMENT realize the damage your careless attitude and words will cause your TRUE first born child? What kind of mental-gymnastics did you have to go through to come up with this idea or was it something your counselor from LDSFS put into your pretty little head?
Well dear M.... SHE IS A FIRST TIME MOM! It is my belief and many other people's belief that simply because you give birth to a child does not make you their mother. Simply because JJ grew in J's womb does not make her JJ's mother. A mother can be a woman other than the biological parent, especially if she fulfills the main social role in raising the child. In fact if you go to wikipedia the first definition of mother is.... "a woman who has raised a child." So M since you have your panties in such a bind that they are clearly spewing out of your mouth why don't you take on society because society is who has put that definition out there. Society is the one you should be flat out attacking. They also believe that a mother is the woman who raises the child. Which in J's case would be the adoptive mother.
J is a first time mom just as I was a first time mom when I became Cayden's mother. Get off your sad sorry horse and realize that it's not that J is thoughtless or heartless it is that she has respect for JJ's mother. Having respect for her means that she wouldn't claim the label that RIGHTFULLY BELONGS TO ANOTHER WOMAN. A woman that she trusted to raise and love the baby girl she brought into this world. The woman that she wanted to be JJ's mother.
Just as J isn't JJ's mother I am not Ally's mother. I didn't fully realize this until after a visit with Cayden and Ally. I realized then that I loved Ally differently than I loved Cayden. And you know there is NOTHING wrong with that because Ally has a mother that loves her, and cares for her. She has a mother that she runs to when her feelings are hurt, she has a mother that calms her fears and tucks in her at night. I remember the visit when I realized that my feelings were different about Cayden and Ally. For a little bit I thought I was wrong to feel differently about them. That was until I realized that I was right. Ally wasn't my daughter and Cayden was my son. I should feel differently toward Cayden because I am the one that he runs to for love, I am the one that clams his fears and tucks him in at night. My blog post about my feelings can be read HERE.
So again M.... You have no right to attack J in such a way nor do you have a right to say that she isn't a first time mom. She in fact as the definition set by society is a first time mom!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
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11 comments:
thanks katelyn! i heart you too.
Way to go Katelyn! Way to put her in her place! Some people are just unbelievable!
Hmm, I rather inclined to agree with M.
I can understand that neither of you may think of yourself as JJ or Ally's moms - and to be honest, that title is JJ's or Ally's choice.
However, when you said you didn't think of yourself as Ally's mother or of her as your daughter, that cut me to the bone. She is still your daughter and you are still her mother - just as she is also her amom's daughter and her amom is also her mother. As you pointed out, the dictionary has a few different meanings for mother and they describe both you and her amom.
So, fair enough about the title "mom" - as I said, that is up to Ally and JJ. However, disassociating yourself from the titles mother/daughter when it comes to Ally could be hurtful to her. It would have been like a stab in the heart if my bmom had never thought of me as her daughter or herself as my mother - even though there was another mother raising me as her daughter. My amom is my mom but both my amom and bmom are my mothers.
I agree with jj. This is hurtful. I thought this was all supposed to be about giving kids a better life not denying them their chapter 1. Since when is adoption a magical spell that makes people forget they carried a child in their body for nine months and gave birth to them?
Not their mother? That's delusional. That is cold.
Denying your child is hurtful to the child. That is not what is best.
Never once did I "deny" my child. Never once did I forget the 8 1/2 months that I was pregnant with her. Never once did I say I was forgetting her birth and the time that I spent with her in the hospital when I was her mother. The time before I relinquished my parental rights and gave her a mother AND A FATHER that loved her as much as I do. I've NEVER forgotten the pain that I lived through as I placed my birth daughter into her earthly mothers arms. I never have and I never will. HOWEVER... as time as gone on and as she has continued to build a relationship with her mother I have realized that she doesn't have that same relationship with me. She doesn't have a mother/daughter relationship with me because I choose another mother for her. So I feel that if I called myself her mother (strictly her mother and not her birth mother) that would be discrediting her mother (Lori) and hurting her in a way much more profound.
AND I never disassociated Ally as my birth daughter. NEVER! That is wrong for you to say I did. NEVER!!!!!
I didn't say you disassociated yourself from thinking of Ally as your birth daughter, I said you disassociated yourself from thinking of her as your daughter. She is your daughter just as Cayden is your son.
I specifically pointed out that mum and dad are titles that are up to your daughter to bestow so of course, they are likely to belong to her APs. However, she does have two mothers and two fathers - both with and without prefixes. Placing for her adoption didn't just replace one family with another family, it actually created 2 families, old and new. She will always still be a part of your family because their blood is running through her veins.
Anyway, back to the mum/mother, I do agree that you don't have a mum relationship with her. However, you will always be one of her mothers and she will always be your daughter, whether you put a prefix in front or not.
By the way, I never implied that you didn't care for Ally, you obviously do. I just don't feel you need to put a prefix before either of your children.
"So I feel that if I called myself her mother (strictly her mother and not her birth mother) that would be discrediting her mother (Lori) and hurting her in a way much more profound"
Btw I know quite a few adoptive parents. Many of them have said that even though they consider themselves alone to be Mom, the actual title "mother" they consider to belong to both themselves and their child's bmom. As I said in an earlier post, there are two meanings of mother and you each fit one of the meanings.
I am an adoptee, and I agree that there is more than one way to define a mother. I have two mothers. One who gave birth to me, and one who raised me. When I first spoke with her, my first mother said that she had only one child, my brother--whom she kept and raised--that hurt. She *parented* him, not me, but she is still my mother. That's what society told her to say.
I talked to my fmom about the exchanges on M's blog, and she agreed that she was not a "first-time mom" when she gave birth to him, five years after she had me. We are *both* her children. We don't have the same parent-child relationship that she shares with my brother, but she is still my mother.
Over on her blog, M was upset because she was thinking about what adoptees might feel, and she was polite enough to apologize for the initial tone of her message. J accepted that apology. The underlying message, however, is still worth listening to, and if you look at J's profile, you'll see that she changed it. She *listened* to what adult adoptees had to say. We don't know if her daughter's feelings would be hurt if she said she was only mother to her kept daughter, but what if she *was* hurt? Isn't it worth thinking about?
And while it isn't Christian to hurt the feelings of others, protecting adoptive parents shouldn't be done at the cost of the feelings of the adoptee. If an adoptive parent is upset when a first parent refers to herself as a child's "mother," the adoptive parents need to reevaluate themselves and figure out why they feel so insecure in relation to a word. Aren't they raising the child? Don't they have a privileged relationship with that child? Saying that there is only one mother doesn't erase a child's DNA. Ridiculous.
No. Now that I think of it, you are absolutely correct. You are most definitely not the mother as ice seems to flow freely through your veins. No child deserves to have a mother like that.
You made the right decision.
Bee... Not too sure how "ice seems to flow freely through my viens" but ok. I do agree that I did make the right decision for my child.
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